The Emotions of Medea: An Introduction

Abstract

Ancient Greek and Roman emotions have become a field of increasing academic interest over the last few decades. We can particularly refer to such formative scholars in the field as David Konstan, Douglas Cairns, Robert Kaster, and more recently Angelos Chaniotis – though the cast list goes much wider. Early interest in emotions prevalent across classical genres, such as shame, anger, pity, envy/jealousy, and erôs (erotic love, desire), has more recently expanded to include more peripheral emotions such as forgiveness, remorse, and disgust. A number of studies, too, have focused on specific genres. This research has been conducted against a background of much wider interest in emotion studies in fields as diverse as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, medicine, philosophy, jurisprudence, history, literary studies, and the performing arts. Many publications by Classicists have demonstrated awareness of this wider body of research, and some of them directly incorporate theoretical findings – particularly from cognitive psychology, but from other disciplines too – into exploration of classical texts and other media.